|
September 30, 2007
In Goodbye to Newspapers? in the New York Review of Books Russell Baker says that it is on the ownership and management side that the gravest problems for mainstreaam newspapers exist. He quotes from a recent speech given by John S. Carroll, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times, to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, who states that in the post-corporate phase of ownership:
we have seen a narrowing of the purpose of the newspaper in the eyes of its owner. Under the old local owners, a newspaper's capacity for making money was only part of its value. Today, it is everything. Gone is the notion that a newspaper should lead, that it has an obligation to its community, that it is beholden to the public....
Someday, I suspect, when we look back on these forty years, we will wonder how we allowed the public good to be so deeply subordinated to private gain....What do the current owners want from their newspapers?—the answer could not be simpler: Money. That's it.
Baker says that the Wall Street theory is that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product. The relentless demands for improved stock performance has resulted in a policy of slash-and-burn cost-cutting that has left the media landscape littered with frail, failing newspapers which are increasingly useless to any reader who cares about what is happening in the world, the country, and the local community.
The implication is that the new-style corporate owners are indifferent to, and often puzzled by, their editors and reporters making the traditional argument that journalism's business is to provide a public service by supplying the information the citizenry needs for democracy to work. Maybe this democratic function is more than the press can bear, whilst a lazy Canberra Press Gallery, like its Washington counterparts, has tacitly given up its obligation to keep the public informed without fear or prejudice because of their tendency to defer excessively to political power.
So we have the tendency to repeat the narrative of government as the powerful tell it.
|
Gary,
There is a review of Margaret Simons' new book---The Content Makers: Understanding the Media in Australia ---- by Bridget Griffen-Foley in the Australian Book Review.
The latter says that Simons is concerned to distinguish between the content of media and the business of media. For Simons, ‘content’ implies the plastic solider and not the packaging. Her interest is in journalism, drama and any kind of content that ‘really matters’, and the opportunities and risks now confronting content makers.